


Like Brother, Like Mother, Like Son

by onward_came_the_meteors



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers Tower, Backstory, Bruce Banner & Bucky Barnes Friendship - Freeform, Bruce Banner & Steve Rogers friendship, Bruce Banner Feels, Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky Barnes and Bruce Banner are Related, Canon Divergence, Ceiling Vent Clint Barton, Friendship, Gen, Headcanon, Minor Bucky Barnes/Steve Rogers, One Shot, POV Third Person, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Rebecca Barnes is Rebecca Banner, Sad, Steve Rogers Feels, Team Dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-02
Updated: 2020-09-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:00:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26253046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onward_came_the_meteors/pseuds/onward_came_the_meteors
Summary: Bruce didn't think about his family that often.He didn't expect that to change when he started helping Captain America track down his boyfriend.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 35





	Like Brother, Like Mother, Like Son

**Author's Note:**

> So I ran across this headcanon somewhere and fell in LOVE. As far as I can tell, it isn't based in anything other than the fact that both Bucky's sister and Bruce's mother are named Rebecca, but it is everything. And I sadly could not find any content for it, so here I go making my own!

  
  


Bruce Banner didn’t think about his family that often.

He didn’t expect that to change when he started helping Captain America track down his boyfriend.

After one of the craziest news weeks since… well, since last year, when Thor had rocked up with yet another spaceship full of maniac aliens to go with the maniac aliens of the  _ previous _ year, Bruce had found himself in one of Tony’s planes, flying to a hospital in Washington D.C., of all places, where the rest of the Avengers were convening around the bed of a barely-conscious Steve Rogers—who Bruce didn’t even think could  _ get  _ hurt anymore, much less bad enough to need anything more than a quick bandaging-up in between spontaneous bouts of skydiving. 

Then again, nearly drowning after falling from the wreckage of a sinking helicarrier was the kind of thing that tended to have a category all its own.

Natasha had filled in the gaps of what every news station in the country hadn’t already been shouting (which was a lot less than he’d thought, really. Tony had been trying to break the world record for how many news broadcasts could be played simultaneously for the entire flight to D.C., and the majority could be summed up by:  _ there are helicarriers in the Potomac and no one really knows why, there is a mysterious government organization secretly monitoring in everyone’s lives but not anymore, _ and  _ Captain America!!! _ — _ he was involved, too _ ), and it had been… Well. It had been. Bruce did not envy his teammates in the slightest; that was all he could say after the story of Nick Fury’s assassination, Nick Fury’s revival, Hydra’s revival—or more accurately, the absence of Hydra’s assassination, and the revival of Steve’s old boyfriend, who was now an assassin. 

All of them had shied away from that last subject at first—all it had taken was the look in Steve’s eyes after Tony started to ask “ _ So this Winter Soldier you’re talking about, he was really—?” _ and everyone had shut up—but once Steve’s almost terrifyingly fast super soldier body had recovered, he had thrown himself into the job of Finding The Winter Soldier with a vengeance.

Steve being Steve, he’d tried to do it on his own. The Avengers being the Avengers, they wouldn’t let him.

Well, more accurately, his new friend wouldn’t let him—his name was Sam and that was all Bruce knew about him, except that he’d cracked a joke once that caused Bruce to add a cautious “ _ can fly(?) More data needed _ ” in his mental list. He seemed like a pretty decent guy, and he’d clearly made an impression on Steve, judging from the fast friendship they’d fallen into, one full of bizarre references that Bruce didn’t get and probably didn’t want to, but he was the first one to join Steve’s little mission.

Natasha had been next, once she’d gotten the U.S. government off her tail. Somehow she’d gotten hold of Hydra files on the Winter Soldier and presented them to Steve before vanishing off to do who knew what in the wake of all of her covers being spilled for the world to see. Every so often, they would get a cryptic message (in different handwriting each time), usually along with whatever information she’d managed to scrounge up or a cheery postcard of wherever she definitely was not, because that was her odd way of making a joke.

Once Natasha was committed to something, Clint was never far behind, even if he’d waved away all the questions about what he’d been doing for the past two years (“and why are you wearing  _ flannel? _ ” “Drop it, Stark”) with a vague “personal business” and abrupt vanishing into the air vents. Despite being… well,  _ Clint _ , he was still one of the former S.H.I.E.L.D.'s best agents, and surprisingly good at appearing wherever rumors of a Winter Soldier sighting had been popping up, even though so far none of them amounted to anything.

Tony was on board as well—as soon as he’d exhausted every Russian-spy, back-from-the-dead, and overthrowing-the-government joke he had in his arsenal—asking Steve how exactly he was planning to go about finding his friend without Stark Industries funding and brushing off Steve’s “you can’t solve every problem by throwing money at it, Tony” with a “well, you’ve gotta admit it can’t hurt” and proceeding to set JARVIS on the task.

Thor… Thor was still in space. They had tried to call him, but ended up hearing muffled ringing from under a couch cushion in Thor’s section of the Tower that turned out to be the phone Tony had given him two years ago. Since the only other form of communication they had with him was shouting at the sky and hoping his friend with the magic vision was paying attention, they quickly gave up on asking for his help.

And that only left Bruce, who agreed as soon as he was asked. As relieved as he was not to have been involved in the craziness of everything his teammates had been involved in over the past year and a half, he still felt bad about not being there to help. Even if he wasn’t exactly the person you’d call to  _ calm down _ the craziness. 

Anyway, he figured if anyone was asking for his help in something that didn’t involve the Other Guy—more and more of a rarity these days—it was a step in the right direction. And, honestly… who could say no to Steve Rogers when he had  _ that _ look on his face?

So that was how Bruce ended up in the meeting room of the Tower as rain drummed on the windows outside, watching Steve and Sam come out of the elevator and wondering how they were planning to track down an amnesiac assassin who didn’t want to be found.

“—and all I’m saying is that it’s a lot more useful than throwing around a glorified Frisbee,” Sam was finishing as he stepped into the room, glancing briefly around at the couches and tables, enough to fit a small army even though there were never more than eight people up here at a time.

Steve was smiling in spite of himself. “Any time you want to test that theory, I’m ready to go.”

“Oh no. This was all hypothetical. In case you ever wanted to give it a try sometime when I’m very far away.”

“Right.” Steve pulled out a chair for himself and seemed to notice Bruce for the first time. In his defense, Bruce had been kind of lurking behind a tall lamp, but he’d been expecting more people to have shown up by now. “Hey, Doctor Banner.”

Bruce nodded. “Hey, Steve. Sam.”

“Hey,” Sam echoed. He sat down next to Steve and looked around the room again, this time up at where the balcony wrapped around near the top of the ceiling. Bruce didn’t know why exactly Tony had built this place so that you could drop a pen from the top floor and it would hit the ground somewhere at the tenth, but he suspected it was for getting the suit from room to room in a way that allowed for maximum showing-off. “Steve was showing me around the, ah, superhero lifestyle.” 

Steve sighed. “You’re a superhero now, too, you know.”

“Yeah, sure, but you’ve got to admit this—” Sam spread his arms to indicate the room and possibly the Tower as a whole “—is on a different level.”

“Our personalities tend to take up a lot of space,” Bruce deadpanned, grinning a little in spite of himself. Sam laughed.

“No kidding.”

There was a muffled, hollow sound from above, and all three of them instinctively lifted their eyes to the ceiling.

Sam was the first to speak. “You guys have people in your vent?” His tone was half-joking, but the way his glance cut to Steve implied he had figured it out.

Bruce shrugged. “Vents plural, person singular. That’s Clint.”

As if on cue, Clint dropped down from the ceiling, landing on top of the table in a pose so practiced he somehow managed not to kick any of them in the face. “You called?”

“Get off of there,” Steve said, reaching out to give him a shove. “We eat on this table, you know.”

Clint slid out of the way, landing in the chair next to Bruce with a thud. “Fine, I see how it is.” He tapped his hands on the tabletop to the beat of some off-key rhythm as he nodded to Bruce and Sam. “Nice to see you guys again. I think. Have we met?”

“Coming from you?” Bruce asked.

“Oh, that’s low, Banner. You know the only reason they put  _ you _ on the merchandise at all is to liven up the color scheme, right?”

Bruce shook his head. “I guess someone’s gotta do it.”

“Is this everybody?” Steve interrupted, looking around at the other three like he expected more people to pop up and fill the remaining chairs. When none did, he leaned back and clasped his hands together on the edge of the table.

Clint started to count off on his fingers, quite a few of which were wrapped up in Band-Aids from whatever ill-advised post-fall-of-S.H.I.E.L.D. mission he’d set out on. “Let’s see: Stark is at some business-type meeting with his girlfriend and tragically couldn’t make it, Nat’s probably on the other side of the globe, Thor’s MIA as always—Missing In Asgard—and Fury won’t answer my calls.” The last few words were punctuated with a cheeky grin. “So, yeah: everybody. I wouldn’t bother telling us to ‘assemble’ now, Cap, we’ll just look ridiculous.”

“Wasn’t planning on it.” Steve stared down at the empty tabletop for another moment before taking a deep breath and continuing. “Right. So, what’ve we got?”

Bruce slid his hand under the table and pressed a hidden button; in front of them, several holographic screens flickered to life (because Tony was incapable of owning just a regular dining table), the largest displaying a translucent world map with several pinpointed areas outlined in red, and the others rapidly switching between scrolling chunks of text and encoded files that needed a password to open. It looked like a lot, but even this and more hadn’t been able to track down the Winter Soldier after all this time, and the longer they waited, their chances of finding him went down. Bruce had no doubt in the guy’s ability to get off the grid if he had managed to stay off even S.H.I.E.L.D.’s radar for so long.

_ Just under seventy years, if the math is right.  _ Bruce hadn’t been able to pull that off even for a tenth of that amount of time—but to be fair, the Winter Soldier didn’t have to contend with the embodiment of rage destroying city streets and smashing up buildings wherever he went. That kind of thing tended to give away one’s location.

Sam leaned forward to read one of the screens aloud. “‘Last potential sightings: D.C., Romania—damn, that’s a jump—Tennessee, New York, Budapest—”

“God, I hope not.” Clint dropped his head into his hands, only a sliver of eyeballs peeking out from between his fingers.

“—Belarus, Montreal—doubt it—another one in New York… apparently your boyfriend’s a world traveler.”

Steve’s eyes were fixed to the map. “I was expecting maybe two or three locations—places we could scout out, maybe bring the Falcon wings—”

“Yeah, no,” Sam said. “That all comes later. Right now, when a ghost story this big pops up, everybody everywhere wants to be the one to find it. We’re gonna get a lot of false leads before we find anything legit.”

“And if his training was anything like Nat’s, he’ll be long gone from any of these places by the time we get to them,” Clint added. “Hell, we’re probably already behind.”

Steve furrowed his brow. “Then what’s the point to doing this?”

“Because we have something he doesn’t,” Bruce said. He tapped his finger in the air around the hologram a few times, unlocking the secure parts of the files. More and more fanned out around them, showing looped and blurry videos of dark figures huddled in crowds, transcripts from S.H.I.E.L.D. and not from S.H.I.E.L.D. of past Winter Soldier encounters, and several paragraphs of Russian that were skillfully being translated before their eyes.

“Teamwork,” Clint finished gravely.

“Kick-ass superhero technology,” Sam suggested.

“Determination,” Steve said at the same moment.

Bruce blinked at all of them. “Actually, I was just going to say JARVIS, but… your answers work too.”

The four of them silently separated into their own tasks—reading through the files (the ones that were still mostly in Russian were slid over to Clint’s stack. Bruce didn’t know whether Clint actually knew Russian or if he just didn’t want to correct them, but the stack was staying evened out, so he decided to give him the benefit of the doubt), cross-referencing the blurry photos and videos with all the facial recognition they had on the Winter Soldier, highlighting everything in the transcripts that might be a clue or a location or some kind of assassin homing beacon, and rewatching the footage of the helicarriers plunging into the river for the thousandth time (that last one was mostly Steve).

A few minutes in, JARVIS appeared as a notification at the corner of Bruce’s screen; a link captioned with the phrase  _ “Sir was reminded to send you this. He says he is sorry to be unavailable and hopes this will help.” _

“Tell him to pay attention to his meeting,” Bruce muttered, clicking on the link. 

Another notification appeared before it could load:  _ “Miss Potts already has. A number of times.” _

The smile that was starting on his face vanished as the screen changed to something completely different from what he had been looking at before.

“Oh, I was hoping he’d have one of these.” Bruce didn’t realize he’d spoken aloud until Steve glanced up from across the table.

“What is it?”

Bruce started to gesture at the screen before remembering that Steve couldn’t see it and put his hands back down on the table. “Satellite detecting and search system. It’s the same thing they were using to find Loki in Germany, but… upgraded.”

“Upgraded is good.”

“Yeah.” Bruce began to type, thankful Tony had made it more user-friendly than the last time he’d seen it. Not that he didn’t think spiraling keyboards and massive amounts of shorthand commands were interesting—at least to watch—but not everybody lived in Tony Stark’s brain. “Key words ‘Winter Soldier,’ I’m guessing? Something tells me the news isn’t going to be calling him ‘Bucky.’”

“Doubt it,” Steve agreed. “Try ‘James Barnes,’ too, just in case.”

_ James Barnes. _

Bruce’s hands stilled over the holographic keyboard. “Sorry, what?”

Steve frowned. “James Buchanan Barnes.” His mouth pulled tight when he said the name, a name he probably hadn’t heard aloud in the span of time between the 1940s and last month. “That’s his full name.”

“I was wondering where ‘Bucky’ came from,” Sam spoke up, his eyes flicking back and forth between Bruce and Steve like he was picking up on the tension in the room. Across from him, Clint had stopped scrolling through the half-translated text floating above the table.

Bruce was barely aware of it. Everything around him was being pushed away until only the memory of the lowest shelf of the bookcase in the living room remained, the one that held the old photo album that was mostly held together with tape and hope at that point, filled with pictures in smudged black and white. The memory had blurred in the years between childhood and now, but it was still there and still tied to that soft voice whispering in his ear as small hands touched the worn-out pages, the voice he usually only remembered when he was asleep. And the fact that he could clearly remember the voice saying  _ that name… _ Hmm. It meant things. His mind—and why did his mind have to be so smart; really, it wasn’t helping at all—was already flinging up a hypothesis, one that had repercussions he didn’t even want to think about.

If it were true.

Which it wasn’t.

Because this was just a coincidence, and he was making it into something it didn’t need to be.

_ Stop overreacting, Banner. Nobody likes you when you overreact. _

Coincidence.

Steve was still watching him. So were the other two, of course, but they were being a lot more subtle about it. Captain America didn’t do “subtle.” He let you know what he was thinking, whether intentionally or not, and he didn’t hesitate to prove it just in case you weren’t sure. “Why do you ask?”

Bruce slowly began to type again, watching the little blue letters blink into existence in front of him. “No reason.”

_ Barnes. _

* * *

The next instance of “coincidence” happened a few days later, when Bruce had almost put the first out of his mind (“almost” being the key word, but it was a little hard to forget about it entirely when every one of the people he shared a tower with were discussing the topic practically 24/7) and the team was sitting down—or standing, in Steve’s case, or crouching on top of the couch like some bizarre gargoyle, in Clint’s—to pick up on the search.

Tony was back from his meeting and currently lounged across two chairs as his fingers tapped across the iPad in his lap, but the other four remained the same; Natasha was still vanished off the face of the earth, Thor was still  _ literally _ vanished off the face of the earth, Pepper had barely been at the Tower for a few hours before she had to catch another flight, and Rhodey was somewhere doing “Air Force things,” according to Tony (“Oh, you mean doing my job?” was what Rhodey had said on the other end of the phone. Tony had stuck out his tongue at the phone even though Rhodey obviously couldn’t see it and hung up). 

The room had been dead quiet for the past hour—which was such a rarity that Bruce kept lifting his head up from the files he was sorting through to make sure nobody had left without announcing themselves—except for the creaking of chairs as they shifted positions and the faint music coming from Sam’s earbuds, which he was sharing with Steve to introduce him to the music of this century and also probably to annoy Tony.

Bruce was flicking through clips from alleged Winter Soldier sightings to see if there were any matches too vague for JARVIS’s facial recognition to pick up on when he saw it.

Someone had slipped in an extra photo—maybe as an oversight, maybe as a reference—that was definitely not from any recent reports and was definitely of the real James Barnes. The Winter Soldier. Bucky. Whoever.

The photo was black and white and a little blurry, but Bruce knew who it was at an instant; not because of Barnes but because of the man next to him, short and small with a shock of light hair. Steve Rogers, before he took the serum that made him Captain America. 

_ So that’s what Steve would look like if he let his hair grow out a little longer _ , Bruce thought before mentally shaking himself. There was a lot different in this picture besides the haircut. 

He slid his gaze to Bucky Barnes—there was really no one else it could be—and stared for a moment. 

The only pictures he’d seen of Barnes before this were the motion-blurred, panic-tainted ones taken during Steve, Natasha, and Sam’s encounters with the Winter Soldier by quick-thinking civilians. Those photos showed a living weapon with a shrouded face to match the shrouded identity, an assassin with a metal arm who could go after superheroes and survive—nothing of this Bucky, a man who smiled at the camera as he slung one arm around his best friend whose head barely reached his shoulder. A closer look even revealed that his other hand—the one that would later be ripped off along with the rest of the arm—was clasped around one of Steve’s.

But also… there was something, something about the shine of Barnes’s eyes; the line of his nose; the strands of hair, dark and thick, artfully pushed back from his forehead. Too many somethings to really ignore, especially when the somethings belonged to  _ James Buchanan Barnes. _

So Bruce looked around the table, took his glasses off, put his glasses back on, and cleared his throat. “Hey, Steve?” He winced. Either he’d gotten used to the utter silence or he’d spoken louder than he’d meant to.

Steve glanced up, but so did everyone else. Clint was last, probably because his hearing aids were in his pocket instead of in his ears, but he’d said he needed to “concentrate, and I can’t do that with them two jabbering away about science and  _ them _ two jabbering away about tragic pasts.”

“Yeah?” Steve took his single earbud out of his ear while Sam pressed the pause button on his phone.

Bruce fought the urge to take his glasses off again. He pointed to the screen, still showing the photo of a younger Barnes and Steve. “Did…” He wasn’t sure what to call him. In his head, he’d been mostly “Cap’s boyfriend,” probably because of hanging out with Tony too much, or else just “the Winter Soldier,” which Steve most definitely did not want to hear. “... did he have any family? Back in the forties, I mean?”

Steve frowned as though confused. “Yeah, of course. Why?”

“Um. Just wondering if you think he’d remember them.”

“I doubt it. He didn’t even remember me at first.” Steve’s eyes were downcast. “And, well… they’re probably all dead now anyway.”

Bruce’s apology was halfway out of his mouth when Clint sat up from his perch on the couch, apparently having worked his hearing aids back into his ears. 

“You mean you didn’t try to find out yet?”

Steve shook his head. “No. Ever since I got out of the ice, everyone’s been telling me who’s dead and who’s not—and it’s mostly the former answer. I just… I didn’t want to hear any more.”

Sam twisted in his chair. “You checked out that pamphlet I gave you after you got out of the hospital, right?”

“I’ll get around to it.”

“Actually, fun fact,” Tony interrupted, standing up from his seat and gesturing at the far wall. “JARVIS? Give me Project Manchurian Candidate.”

Sam grinned into his hand as the wall flickered to life with a projection of what looked very much like a slideshow.  _ Actually, scratch that; it  _ is  _ a slideshow _ , Bruce amended as Tony started flipping through slides with an impatient hand. He could only catch glimpses of more black and white photos mixed in with ones in color, quick summaries typed out above timelines, and once what sounded like the opening bars of “Star-Spangled Man with a Plan” until Tony finally settled on the slide he wanted.

This one was mostly words, and Bruce squinted at it for a few seconds before remembering his glasses. The title of the slide read: “Family: At Least the Ones We Know About,” floating above a scattering of more black-and-white photos of what looked like a group of children. 

“Tony, what is this?” Steve asked.

“A compilation.” Tony shrugged. “I figured putting together everything we have on Barnes might point us to where he went—and if not, it can’t hurt, right?”

Steve opened his mouth, then closed it. Opened it again. “Tony, does that say  _ eleven hundred slides? _ ”

“Give or take. Hey, when you live for over ninety years, you tend to amass quite the portfolio.”

“Even if you spend most of those years frozen in a cryogenic chamber?” Sam asked with a raised eyebrow.

“Yeah, those parts were tricky. That’s why most of these are from before all that. Back in the good ol’ days.”

Bruce couldn’t figure out which part of that was meant to be sarcastic, but before he could, a little red dot appeared in the center of one of the photos

The four of them turned around to find Clint aiming a laser pointer at the screen with the same intensity he used to fire his bow. 

“Where did you get a laser pointer?” Bruce asked. Clint didn’t answer, but the little red light wobbled around until it was circling the largest photo, the one of a couple standing surrounded by children of various ages, all dressed in nineteen-twenties-ish clothes. The woman was holding a baby and the man had his hand on the shoulder of the only boy in the cluster of children, who also looked to be the oldest.

“Those’re his siblings? And parents?”

Steve gave a single nod as Tony launched into a narration.

“Let’s see: parents are George and Winifred Barnes, both already dead before the start of World War Two. Four younger sisters...” He listed off names and dates of birth and death, keeping an eye on Steve all the while. The words and numbers started to blur together until Tony got to the last one: “... and then the youngest, Rebecca Barnes, born nineteen twenty-eight and dead nineteen seventy-six.”

The glasses fell out of Bruce’s hand and onto the table with a clink, but nobody was watching him.

Sam was saying something to Steve, who was nodding and saying something back, and Tony had stuck his hands in his pockets at the front of the room as his mouth moved in a way that looked like “I’m sorry,” and Clint had flicked off his laser pointer and was flipping it over and over in the air, catching it every time because of course he did that because he was Hawkeye because—

Bruce blinked hard, and when he opened his eyes again, Tony was looking curiously over at him.

“Everything good over there, big guy?”

_ Ha.  _ “Um, can you say that last one again?” Bruce could feel the others’ eyes on him now, but focused only on Tony as he nodded.

“Sure. Uh… ‘Rebecca Barnes, born nineteen twenty-eight, died nineteen seventy-six.’ That’s it; all Barnes siblings accounted for. Or, you know, so we thought. But why do you ask?”

“Is there a lead?” Sam asked at the same moment. “I don’t see how there can be, if they’re all dead, but…” He trailed off to look back at Steve, who seemed to be rereading the dates for himself.

Bruce felt like his body was now so still that he wouldn’t ever be able to move again, but he slowly got up from his chair and crossed to the front of the room. 

“Well,” he said. His eyes found the photo on the screen, the place where the baby, the littlest of Bucky Barnes’s sisters, rested against her mother’s side. It was impossible to pick out details from the old photograph, but he still felt like the baby’s eyes were staring back at him. “I have some interesting news, then.”

* * *

It hadn’t been a hard thing to confirm. JARVIS and the remnants of S.H.I.E.L.D. intelligence combined probably had access to the majority of the world’s information, and finding the marriage records of a woman who’d been dead for decades—and who, despite her familial connections, had still been a civilian—didn’t take much time at all (despite how long it had felt for Bruce, who’d avoided everyone’s eyes as they waited for the screen to load). So, no, it hadn’t been hard to certify, one hundred percent, that Rebecca Barnes had become Rebecca Banner.

The hard part was the fact that Bruce was still living in the same tower as Steve.

And that there were perhaps no pair of people with worse strategies of dealing with their problems than the man who volunteered himself for experimentation, crashed a plane into the Arctic, and spent almost a century in a coma and the man who became a fugitive from the government and spent years in third-world countries pretending the monster in his brain didn’t exist.

(Barring the man who taunted death on a regular basis, encased himself in figurative and literal armor, and had willingly lived with poison in his chest, but it was hard to top Tony Stark at anything—and when it came to unhealthy coping mechanisms? Please)

Bruce didn’t think either of them was doing it on purpose.  _ He  _ certainly wasn’t, at least—and  _ no _ , it didn’t mean anything when he stayed leaning against the counter all during breakfast because the only empty chair was the one next to Steve. He just felt like standing sometimes, that was all.

But the fact remained that things were now very awkward among two of the Avengers, to the point where Tony was starting to make jokes about needing a repulsor to cut the tension in the room. And although Bruce rolled his eyes, there was a small, small, part of him that knew where he was coming from.

Life mostly went on over the next couple weeks, everyone continuing the search for Bucky Barnes whenever they could—Steve had (understandably) made it his new full-time job, and Sam would’ve been a close contender if he hadn’t also had an actual job—and going about their own business when they couldn’t. Bruce had several projects going in the lab, Tony had Pepper and Rhodey and a massive company that still had his name on the logo even if he was no longer the CEO, and Clint… well, Clint either had no obligations or more obligations than any of them, judging from how often he would drop off the grid for days at a time. 

The times when everyone  _ was  _ at the Tower, though… those were the times when it became a lot harder to not-avoid-Steve.

Like in the kitchen, for instance, which tended to be one of the most crowded chokepoints. After the first couple of times seating had aligned to leave Bruce and Steve with the only empty chairs, Steve’s workout routines (which had shifted from destroying punching bags to running with Sam, which was good for the gym equipment but not for Sam’s self-esteem) had mysteriously switched to the times Bruce normally left his room.

Or during movie nights, which had died down a bit now that Thor wasn’t around to remind them all of the gaps in his understanding of cultural references, but still happened on occasion whenever any of them wanted a break from thinking about the serious things for a while. A few nights ago had been… well, something about zombies, or maybe aliens, or alien zombies—but when Bruce had sat down, Steve had instantly snagged the chair farthest away from the couch. Neither of them had made eye contact all night, even when Tony had fallen asleep on Bruce’s shoulder and Sam and Clint had started keeping a running score of the human characters’ victories over the zombie aliens.

It even showed up in little things—one night JARVIS had announced that the delivery person had arrived with their food and that someone might want to take Captain Rogers’s order down to the gym for him, and Bruce had found himself pretending he hadn’t heard as Clint did it instead.

The closest call was probably the time with the elevator—Bruce had gotten in and was absorbed with something on his phone when he became aware of Steve stepping in next to him. There had been a moment of  _ ah-shit _ and becoming very interested in the material of the wall before Steve had sighed, turned toward Bruce, opened his mouth—

—and was promptly interrupted by Sam sliding into the elevator with them just as the doors whooshed shut, muttering something about leaving his wings on the second floor. Bruce didn’t think he’d been more relieved since the prototype for Tony’s newest rapid particle-dispersing generator hadn’t exploded in their faces like it had the first fifty trials. 

But Bruce Banner was not known for having incredible luck, and sure enough, almost three weeks after their initial discovery, he bumped into Steve on his way upstairs one night.

It was probably hovering around the midnight area, after Bruce had set his last simulations to run overnight and decided it was probably a good idea to get to bed, especially once he saw Tony passed out on the couch.

Steve had evidently had the opposite idea, judging from the pajamas (well, the Steve Rogers version of pajamas, which were just slightly looser versions of his regular clothes) and clouded look in his eyes that implied he had tried to go to sleep, failed, and was now resigning himself to roaming around the quiet Tower for a distraction.

Until Bruce had come upstairs, obviously. Because what was Bruce if not a distraction.

The two of them stared at each other for a few seconds that almost stretched into a full minute, neither of them moving. Steve’s hand was frozen where it had been trailing idly down the railing and Bruce had stopped partway through his mental calculation of how long his current project would take to finish tomorrow.

Bruce was wondering whether there was any chance they could just pretend that they hadn’t seen the other one and go on with their lives, when Steve suddenly fixed him with those blue eyes of his.

“Okay,” he said, and his voice was somewhere between firm Captain America and self-conscious Steve Rogers. “This is weird.”

It was like a plug had been pulled, and Bruce almost laughed with relief.

“You’re telling me,” he said, scrubbing his hair out of his face.

Steve shifted his weight against the railing. “So… right, so this is going to sound bad, but… you really didn’t know?”

Bruce shook his head. “I knew my mom’s maiden name was Barnes, I knew she had an older brother named James who died during World War Two, and I knew Captain America had a best friend—that’s how the history books phrased it—called Bucky.” He shrugged. “I never put it together.”

“I know what the history books say.” The look on Steve’s face made Bruce want to laugh again, before he settled back into seriousness. “Sorry, I had to ask.”

“It’s cool. I probably would’ve asked the same thing. I did, actually, but… “ He had wondered, whenever his thoughts had drifted over the past few weeks, why his mother hadn’t ever told him, but the more he  _ had  _ thought about it, the more reasons he had come up with why she  _ wouldn’t.  _ And later, when he had had his own reasons to look into Captain America, he had been mostly focused on the scientific side, the serum and its components, rather than the man’s personal life. 

Steve glanced at the side of the stairs for a moment before looking back at Bruce. “It’s just that I never would’ve thought…” 

“I know. I look more like my dad.” Bruce had meant that to sound more casual than how it came out.

“No, that’s not what I meant.” Steve gestured toward him. “Actually, now that I know to look for it, I can see it. I just meant that it’s _ weird.  _ It’s weird that you’re technically older than me, in a way, but you’re also the son of my best friend’s baby sister. It… It gives me flashbacks to when they told me Peggy had kids while I was in the ice, and I had that moment of ‘ _ what if, _ ’ you know?” He shook his head wryly. “Listen to me, like anybody could actually know.”

“Well, we live crazy lives,” Bruce offered. Steve snorted, and Bruce couldn’t blame him. It was pretty much the understatement of their combined lifetimes.

They were quiet for another moment, studying each other while pretending that wasn’t what they were doing, before Steve said, apparently without being able to help himself: “Becca sure waited a long time to have kids, huh.”

Bruce tried to ignore the sudden twist in his stomach. “Hmm. It wasn’t on purpose.”

Steve caught his eye and then shut up. Evidently he had reminded himself of the unspoken Avengers Tower rule of maybe-don’t-talk-about-Banner’s-family-life, the one that went right along with don’t-put-your-hand-anywhere-in-the-vicinity-of-the-arc-reactor and don’t-mention-mind-control-unless-you-want-an-arrow-through-the-foot. Bruce wasn’t sure where anybody had gotten the ideas for these rules, but he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t a little bit glad for them.

He took another step up the stairs, and Steve instantly took his hand off the railing and moved aside. They edged past each other carefully and started off in their separate directions; one up, one down.

Bruce wasn’t sure where Steve was planning to go—everyone else was either asleep or not here, and he was fairly certain that the rest of New York City wouldn’t be too appreciative of someone flinging a metal Frisbee around on the roof all night. He might’ve been off for one of his sad motorcycle rides through the streets, but he’d be wearing clothes for that (hopefully, anyway). So down to the gym it was, then, or to mope around the Tower until the others woke up.

Not that Bruce could really judge. He was going to be pretending to be asleep for the next couple of hours, after all.

He paused once he reached the top of the stairs and looked down. “Steve?”

Steve turned around, halfway out of the room. 

“We’re gonna find him.” Bruce put all the conviction he could into his words.

Steve gave a little sort of half smile. “I hope you’re right.” He turned to leave again, stopped, and called back over his shoulder. “Night, Bruce.”

“Night.”

* * *

Bruce didn’t expect to be right, at least not so soon.

But only a week and a half had gone by after his conversation with Steve when Bruce was jolted awake early one morning to JARVIS’s voice hastily announcing an “incoming call,” and Bruce’s half-asleep thoughts of  _ “Emergency? Mission? Code Green?”  _ had led him to accept it, and suddenly Sam Wilson’s voice had echoed out of whatever speakers Tony had installed in there.

“—all right, so we’re in Bucharest now, and we have our target—I don’t know, Barton, just hook it under the seat belt—the Winter Soldier has been neutralized with, uh, minimal property damage, and we’ll be on our way back in however many hours it takes to get this metal arm through airport security. So… Avengers, assemble, or whatever the hell it is.”

The audio cut off after that, but it didn’t matter since Bruce was already out the door.

Once Sam and Clint were definitely on their way back with Barnes (on a quinjet that Tony sent because, as it turned out, neither metal arms  _ or  _ mechanical wings did too well with airport security), everyone had asked Bruce if he wanted to go meet him. He’d declined, pulling out something about how “this is Steve’s thing,” and “I don’t even know the guy.” Fortunately, they’d left him alone after that, and it was a slightly less uncomfortable wait for the others to get back to the Tower.

Steve had been a bundle of energy the whole time, pacing the whole length of the Tower and constantly starting sentences without finishing them. Bruce didn’t think he saw him sit down for the entire length of time between Sam’s update and when the quinjet finally reached the landing pad on the roof.

Bruce didn’t go outside, but hung back and watched through the windows as the door of the jet lowered and three figures stepped out. It was hard to tell from this distance, but the one that must have been Barnes didn’t look anything like the soldier from the Washington D.C. videos. He was wearing a loose hoodie and a baseball cap pulled low over his face, and even the metal arm was held close to his side and covered with a glove.

Steve and Tony were standing out on the entryway, the wind blowing their hair and whipping away their voices as they tried to talk. Steve’s hands were twitching at his sides, like he wanted to run forward, but was stopping himself. Bruce couldn’t blame him. He didn’t think he’d ever seen anybody look more lost than Barnes was at this moment.

Tony was looking back and forth between the two of them before obviously deciding that whatever joke he’d prepared wasn’t worth it, and strode over to talk to Sam and Clint instead. Sam was taking off his Falcon suit and shaking his head before Tony could even get words out, and Clint was limping slightly on one leg as he dropped out of the quinjet.

Finally Bruce saw Steve’s mouth move in a single question. There was a pause before Barnes gave a small, careful, nod. Steve’s shoulders sank with relief and he took a cautious step forward, and Barnes took a cautious step forward, and then they were closing the distance between them entirely, each of them seeming to support the other’s weight while letting themselves drop.

Then Barnes caught the movement of something on the other side of the window, and his eyes met Bruce’s through the glass. Bruce hastily turned and backed away so that he was out of view.

He wasn’t ready to have the conversation.

And fortunately for him, his path and Barnes’s didn’t cross much over the next few days. Steve didn’t seem willing to let him out of his sight and Barnes was still adjusting both to having his mind back and to being in the twenty-first century (He was probably getting some kind of therapy, but it really wasn’t any of Bruce’s business, so he didn’t ask). The two of them spent a lot of time out in the city—which probably also equated to a lot of time avoiding security cameras, but hoodies and baseball caps and JARVIS apparently went a long way, and Steve had mentioned something about a method of avoiding attention that Natasha had taught him with a smirk on his face—either revisiting old places or exploring new ones, and even when they were in the Tower they were mostly caught up in each other’s inside jokes or taking over the training room. Bruce had heard more than enough from Sam about what went on inside the training room.

It was nice, actually, to see the two of them reunite, even if it reminded him of the hollow sort of feeling in his chest. Barnes hadn’t snapped into Winter Soldier mode yet, and Sam’s fledgling rivalry with him seemed to be playful at the least (hostile at the most, but the worst thing that had happened so far was the broken plate and the Falcon wings almost falling on Clint’s head after somebody had stashed them on the ceiling, so hopefully it wouldn’t claim any casualties), and Tony had kept the snarky comments to a minimum, and Clint’s leg had healed from whatever had happened in Romania, and Steve… well, okay, Steve probably  _ had  _ cried at some point, but not that Bruce had seen.

And Bruce? Well, Bruce was doing just fine. There was science to do in the labs, and team things to be pushed into by Tony, and the only time he had ever spoken to Barnes so far was that first day, when he had arrived at the Tower and was introduced to the Avengers—and that hadn’t been much more than a handshake with the non-metal hand and a muttered “nice to meet you,” “you too.” 

“You should talk to him, you know,” Tony had remarked one evening as he handed off a screwdriver to DUM-E. “He might be a recovering assassin, but he isn’t that bad.”

“I don’t know about that,” Sam had interjected. “But, yeah. You should. It’s only gonna get more awkward.”

Bruce had ignored both of them for as long as he could before answering. “I will. Eventually.”

What he hadn’t told them was that he would be fine if “eventually” never came. 

* * *

Bruce woke up when the rubble poking into his back became too painful to ignore.

He opened his eyes and immediately regretted it when the bright sunlight seemed to slice down and pierce directly into his already-forming headache. He groaned and rubbed his hand across his face.

_ Headache. Rubble. And.... yep, naked, or close to it.  _ He’d become very familiar with this little routine over the last few years or so of his life.

Bruce squeezed his eyes shut and tried to remember, but the first thing that floated up was eating dinner last night with the rest of the team. Other than that… 

_ Green—everything green—and lights—buildings falling apart—buildings  _ breaking  _ apart—shouting—and screaming—running and jumping and fighting and  _ angry—

Bruce’s eyes shot open and he tried to sit up, but stopped halfway through with an involuntary groan. His entire body felt like it had been used as target practice for Mjolnir.

“Need a hand?”

The voice was quiet, but nearby, and Bruce had a moment of panic before he spotted a shape hovering a few feet away, leaning against the remains of a half-destroyed brick building. His blurred vision took in the dark clothes, long hair hanging to the shoulders, and the silvery glint of metal poking out of the sleeves.

“Oh, it’s you,” Bruce said. The words rasped on their way out of his throat, choked with dust and sore from what must have been a lot of roaring. 

Barnes gave a nod. “So I’m told.” His gaze flickered over the scene, taking in Bruce and the crater of destruction around him.

Under normal circumstances, Bruce probably would have left it at that, but he was exhausted and strung out and the Hulk had just been scrambling his brain for most of the day, and so before his mind could catch up to his mouth, he found himself blurting out, “D’you know we’re related?”

Immediately, he wished he could take it back, but Barnes apparently had the same level of super soldier hearing as Steve, and his eyes were already going wide.

The eyes that were blue, not brown, but Bruce could still see the resemblance in his face that he had been steadily ignoring for the past few weeks, and it was making his chest hurt even more than it already was after the Hulk had apparently decided to face-plant him into a building.

“It’s you?” Barnes started to take another step forward, but stopped himself. “Steve mentioned something about it when I first got here, but I didn’t catch who it was exactly… to be honest, I was just hoping it wasn’t Stark.”

Bruce laughed in spite of himself. “Don’t let him hear you say that. He does pay to clean up all of our messes, you know.” He gestured around to the essentially ruined downtown of wherever-this-was, U.S.A. 

Barnes shrugged. “Eh. I’ve seen worse.”

Both of them were quiet for a very, very, long moment, listening to the faint wail of sirens that were starting in the distance.

Finally, Barnes spoke, so softly that Bruce had to strain to hear it. “She’s dead now, isn’t she.”

“Yeah.” Bruce’s voice cracked, and it was because of the Hulk, because the Hulk had been roaring all day, that was it, that was the reason. 

Barnes—Bucky—nodded, once, slowly, and leaned down, reaching out with that metal arm to pull Bruce out of the rubble.

Bruce took it.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
